This title is for film buffs and Nirvana fans. For everyone else, this is a post about a rat.
A great big scheming dirty wife-cheating rat.
I'd better start at the beginning.
It was Sunday. It was raining. I think that U2 wrote a song about it.
I was sitting in our living room, drinking tea and reading a book, waiting for something eventful to happen. I heard a scurrying sound. I looked up. And saw a rat.
This is not to be confused with a large mouse. I know the difference. Remember the animated Disney film The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, in which Holmes and Watson and all other goodly characters were portrayed as mice, and the villain was a large rat, and a drunken mouse called him a rat to his face, and the rat fed the drunken mouse to his pet cat? For some reason this is the only part of the movie I remember. Anyway, it was a rat.
It scurried and scampered and hit under the TV cabinet. I lay on the floor and watched it for a while, contemplating my next move. I call June the landlady upstairs. She says she'd come right down. She doesn't seem remotely surprised, which is worrisome. I try calling Ottawa's finest on-the-spot pest removal service and found out that they don't exist.
June comes down wearing flats. I tell her to go back upstairs and get some sensible footwear on, and to bring me some work gloves. She comes back down with two left handed oven mitts. Whatever. I construct a makeshift maze to lead the rat into a kitchen enclosure. I tell June to scare the rat with a broom handle, and out he comes. He is white with grey spots. He would be kind of cute if he wasn't such a dick.
I try and slam a garbage can on him. He throws his rodent bodyweight into my makeshift barrier, knocks it over, and disappears behind the fridge and out of view. We search and we search and we cannot find him. June thinks that he escaped out into the hallway and back into the hell from which it spawned.
At this point, I should explain why the rat is a "he", and not a "she", "he/she", or "it". It's because I refuse to entertain the remotest possibility that it could have been pregnant. Also because his name was Stanley.
I keep searching for Stanley and he is nowhere to be found. I concede that he is probably gone. June goes back upstairs. I board off the doors to the storage rooms in the basement, set two rat traps and install one of those high pitched anti-rodent sirens. Apparently June had these things lying around. I sit down, and open my book.
And there is Stanley again, in the kitchen.
I lose my mind and scream a feral, high pitch scream. Stanley disappears before I can get to him. Maybe he disappeared out the open apartment door (my bad). Maybe he's still in here. I just don't know. But I need to leave and get drunk.
I call June to appraise her of the situation, and that I'm leaving to get drunk. She says she wants into the apartment to "do what she can" with the rat. I don't deal with vagueness so I tell her she does not have my permission. She says she will call the police if she has to. I tell her that is the stupidest thing that I've heard in hours, and that she probably shouldn't have rented her basement to law students if she was gonna pull stuff like that. She relents. June is a strange lady.
I call Andrea. Sweet Andrea knows nothing about anything thus far. She is off having a wonderful dinner with her man-friend, blissfully unaware. She texted me earlier, saying they were stopping by before leaving for dinner. I told them, no. There was an emergency, and they can't come home right now, but I'll handle it. So she might be a little edgy.
I call her, and it goes something (i.e. nothing) like this:
Andrea: Sooooo what's going on?
Alex: We, um, we have a stranger in the apartment.
Andrea: What? Like, some homeless guy broke in? Is he still in there?
Alex: A four legged stranger.
Andrea: Two homeless guys?
Alex: A small, furry, rat faced, four legged stranger.
Andrea: Two homeless guys gave birth to a hairy lovechild with a face like a ...
Alex: THERE'S A DAMN RAT IN OUR FRIDGE. Maybe.
Andrea: Oh. Well, why didn't you say so?
She is taking this well. I should have assumed as much. Georgia girls are tough as nails, after all. She grew up around alligators and komodo dragons and baptists. Rats don't scare her. She is my hero.
Anyway, this was Sunday. It is now late on Tuesday. There is new floor laid down on (half of) the floor. It's cheap vinyl flooring with a faux wood-grain look. It probably won't last a year. But it smells amazing, which is to say it smells like nothing at all.
And no rats. So I think we're in the clear. Which is such a relief.
It feels like the end of a Friday the 13th movie, where Freddy Kruger disappears and never, ever, ever comes back.
Right?
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